Digijava (a.k.a Digi) is an open-source project of the Development Gateway Foundation (http://www.dgfoundation.org/), delivering multi-site web-portal software, based on a J2EE architecture.

The main goal of the project is to deliver a robust implementation of a multisite web framework. In today's complex web, systems that allow the creation of one site, however sophisticated, are insufficient. Companies have number of client audiences, with distinct interests, so the main horizontal portal must contain several vertical ones (vortals) to address each audience in particular. For example, a car company may want to address customers of different age-groups with separate sites. Sites may differ both in design and content. A multinational corporation will, most probabely, want to customize look-and-feel and content of its site for the individual countries to adjust to the cultural specifics and interests of those. Examples can be numerous but the conclusion is clear: making as many installations, of a single-site portal system as we need vortals, is a cumbersome solution, if at all, and does not scale.

Disregarding the fact that support cost will grow with the number of individual installations, the bigger problem is that these sites will be unaware of each-other's existance. They will be isolated. That, in most cases, is not desirable - a high level of interconnection is needed between vortals. That is due to the fact that in the end - they are still members of one horizontal portal. So, they must be able to share members, permissions, content, even parts of design etc, as needed. This, of course, is not possible, in any easy, way for the separate installations.

Digijava provides a robust multisite portal framework (Kernel) and a number of modules built into it (Portal Toolkit). Each Digi site works in parallel to others, using the functional blocks - Digi Modules, from the main repository. Clean separation of the UI and a business tier, as well as the highly flexible templating system allows programmers to implement the functionality only once and provide maximum freedom to the UI designers for the custom building of portal websites. So the portals are independent but not isolated.

Digijava is built on the top of common, popular open-source projects, which allows smoother learning curve, wide-support and thorough QA for the building blocks of the system as well as good community spirit.

Digijava has a lightweight J2EE architecture, using servlet+JSP+POJO paradigm in an MVC framework, trying to avoid the overhead of using EJBs, thus making the system faster, easier, simpler.

Digijava uses Jakarta Struts as the MVC framework, Tiles UI plugin to Struts for templating, Hibernate for Object/Relational Persistence, Swarmcache as cache provider, Quartz Job Scheduler; as well as number of other open-source products.

Digijava can work with a number of J2EE Application Servers, not tied to any particular vendor in any way. It can work with wide range of RDBMSes from the minimalist, but extremely popular, free mySQL to powerful Oracle or MS SQL Server.

Digijava fully supports internationalization with its enhanced translation system for UI and multilingual content-objects for modules. Digi uses UTF-8 encoding